


The Gallery

by Itsamess



Category: An Education (2009), Never Let Me Go (2010), Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
Genre: Crossover, Gen, Two Carey Mulligans are better than one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-10
Updated: 2019-12-10
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:27:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21746743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Itsamess/pseuds/Itsamess
Summary: He takes her to the most sophisticated bars and orders the most expensive wines and always fills her glass before remembering, foolish him, that she is still too young to drink. There’s always a strange look on his face everytime the age gap between them becomes obvious, a sort of amused embarrassment, as if someone just caught him slightly breaking the rules. Ops.Jenny and David goes visiting an old apartment looking for antiquities. They don't find what they expected.
Relationships: Jenny Miller/David Goldman





	The Gallery

Jenny is pretty sure she is in love with him. She _must_ think so, because she promised herself that her first would have been special. And David is special. He is not like the other boys of her age - of course he is not, he is a _man_.  
David has a real job and earns real money and has real conversation with his really cool friends.

He takes her to the most sophisticated bars and orders the most expensive wines and always fills her glass before remembering, foolish him, that she is still too young to drink. There’s always a strange look on his face everytime the age gap between them becomes obvious, a sort of amused embarrassment, as if someone just caught him slightly breaking the rules. Ops.

But it’s just a moment. The rest of the time he treats her like an adult. He asks her what she would like to eat, he doesn’t order for her. He lets her bid shamelessy high sums at the auctions. That’s her favorite thing.

Today they are all going to visit an old apartment, she, David, Helen and Danny. It’s about to be turned into a private doctor studio, so the previous owner’s heir has decided to sell all the furniture. David has bought it in bulk, sight unseen, for a substantial price. 

“That’s a long shot” Danny points out, shaking his head.

“That’s an investment” David corrects him “An old lady used to live there, so it’s probably full of antiquities, art. Even jewels, maybe”

Jenny shifts in her car sit. She can hardly wait to get there. “Do you think we’ll find anything _of merit_?” she ask, trying to use the fancy expressions she heard at the last auction. She hates using childish words, as she is not a child anymore.

“Oh, yeah” David replies, and then adds, smiling: “Maybe even something french”

 _French_. That’s their magic word. 

“And why the hell should we find french stuff?” argues Helen, quite hastily. She doesn’t like long trips, she says they make her car sick.

“The old lady used to call herself _Madame_ ” and then he adds “It means _lady_ , in French.”

“I know what _madame_ means!” Helen hisses “I may not be _educated_ like your pretty little girl here but-”

“Please, let’s non argue, it’s such a lovely afternoon” Danny says. He turns on the radio to a Judie Bridgewater old song, probably just to cover the voice of his angry girlfriend. “Let’s hope the hag was _truly_ french and her apartment is worth its price”

It’s hard to say, when they get inside, because the apartment is really dark, even when they open the windows.  
In the living room there’s a couple of armchairs and a coffee table whose glass top is covered in such a tick layer of dust that it looks like grey moquette. The carpet looks antique, but David barely notices it. He is looking around like he is actually searching for something in particular.  
“It must be here. It must be around here” he mumbles, frustrated.

“What?”

“That hag was famous for owning a Gallery. Those works of art, they all must be hidden here”

They kept examining the living room, then moved to the small bedroom and the even smaller bathroom – but the treasure David is looking for is nowhere to be found. The apartment looks quite ordinary: there are no paintings _of merit_ , and the jewels are “ugly trinkets”, according to Helen.

But there’s a trunk in the bedroom and it’s Jenny the one who finds it (Helen is too well dressed to kneel on such a filthy carpet).  
It’s under the bed. That’s not a place where you keep a treasure, thinks Jenny. That’s the place where you keep a memory. Or a shameful secret. She thinks about David’s hands on her tights – sometimes memory and shame overlap.  
“I think I found something!”  
It’s an old wooden chest closed with a rusty lock. Thanks God David had brought shears. Jenny wonders what’s inside. Maybe silk nightgowns, since French women have exquisite taste, everybody knows that. Or ancient coins. Numismatic is _oh tres chic_.

But when David opens the chest there are no silk gowns, no money.  
There are children craft projects: drawings, small sculptures made of clay or wood carved. A flower composition glued to an ochre-colored cardboard. A poem about a shipwreck and a brave sailor.

“Shit”  
At first Jenny thinks it’s just an expletive, but it’s actually what David thinks of the inside of the chest.  
“Can’t believe it’s all shit”

Danny echoes him: “The old hag… collecting of this _crap_. It’s disgusting, and creepy.” He slams the chest lid shut. “You said she was a teacher, wasn’t she? She probably molested these children and kept their shit as souvenir!”

David gives him a side eye - pedophilia is not is favorite subject. Jenny feels her cheeks violently blushing but it doesn’t make any sense, because she loves David, and theirs isn’t an abusive relationship at all.

“There’s nothing for us here” says David. In his eyes, Jenny can see that yes, he is angry at himself for buying the furniture sight unseen, but he is angrier at this _Madame_ for being so poor and tasteless. “It’s just a bunch of worthless crap”

David, Danny and Helen leave the bedroom, probably to go searching for something more valuable in the rest of the apartment, but Jenny is still sitting on the floor.  
“I like it” she whispers to herself, her voice so faint that nobody hears her. Better off this way, because David would fly off the handle. He can get quite violent, when he is mad - but nothing to be concerned about, of course. 

Slowly, Jenny opens the trunk again. She is not a fool not an hypocrite and she can’t deny she was disappointed by the inside of the it like everybody else. But she also finds touching to see with how much care _Madame_ has kept all these little projects: the clay vases are wrapped in newspaper sheets; the drawings are all piled in a blue folder so they don’t get wrinkled.

 _Worthless crap_ , David called it, but it must have meant something to someone. It must have been worth keeping, for some reasons. There’s too much love, in this drawing. It represents two girls horse riding in the English countryside. One of them, the brunette, has a haughty, but smart look on her face. The other is blond and is smiling so big her cheeks have dimples. 

She kinda looks like Jenny, but it’s hard to say, the apartment is too dark. There’s a signature, in the right bottom corner of the sheet. Jenny absentmindedly runs her thumb over it. _Kathy H_., it says.

**Author's Note:**

> English is not my first language, so I apologize for any mistake.
> 
> Of course this crossover is chronologically impossibile, since Never let me go is set in the Seventies and An Education is the Sixties, but I loved the idea that Jenny and Kathy both found themselves reflecting on art and its fluctuating value - or maybe I just wanted to mash two of my favorite movies, who knows.


End file.
